It's nothing personal, or rather it is something personal with me. As the day wears on, my ears "get tired" and I prefer quiet and/or solitude. I can't say for sure, but I think this all happened as a result of my being stationed on an aircraft carrier for about 3+ years and constantly hearing noise - aircraft engines, steam catapults, and all sorts of pumps and air circulating fans. All the time, everywhere you went, 24-7 unless I was off the ship, of course.
I know for a fact my hearing degraded during those years as I had to take a hearing test both when I enlisted and when I mustered out and I could see by the response graphs I noticeably lost some frequency response. And just recently I went to have my hearing tested again as I noticed there are times I don't quite get what people are saying, especially if there is a lot of background voices like at a party, or family gatherings. What the doc told me was while I am indeed getting worse in the mid-range frequencies (which just happens to be were human voices are), but this time it's nothing unusual. It's just age related, something I'm getting used to hearing - when I can that is. Those little cilia in your ears just plumb wear out.
I know for a fact my hearing degraded during those years as I had to take a hearing test both when I enlisted and when I mustered out and I could see by the response graphs I noticeably lost some frequency response. And just recently I went to have my hearing tested again as I noticed there are times I don't quite get what people are saying, especially if there is a lot of background voices like at a party, or family gatherings. What the doc told me was while I am indeed getting worse in the mid-range frequencies (which just happens to be were human voices are), but this time it's nothing unusual. It's just age related, something I'm getting used to hearing - when I can that is. Those little cilia in your ears just plumb wear out.
So all this leads to my phone story. When I worked as a Mechanical Liaison engineer at Tacoma Boatbuilding Company (TBC), I was in a double wide trailer parked right out on the docks, next to the ships under construction. Inside it was an open trailer with about 4-6 desks, filing cabinets, and drafting boards and I shared it with about 4-5 other guys. Our job was to be johnny-on-the-spot fixers, re-designing and re-releasing engineering to fix problems with how something was originally designed, or how someone ended up building it. Either way, since the problem was suddenly discovered and was holding up further production which could get quite costly, it just as suddenly had to be fixed. The result was if you were a good liaison engineer, the build shops loved you and made a point to seek you out as you could literally mean the difference between that craft making money or not as the actual labor vs. planned labor was reconciled weekly. If you were bad, well, those same crafts saw to it that you didn't last long. It was the law of the jungle out in the shipyard. At the time this story takes place, we all good and knew it, so we were cocky, and it was about as close to one can get to what one reads about professional teams' locker rooms. Oh yeah, the testosterone flowed in that trailer, baby.
And so did the phone calls. It is not an exaggeration to say they rang constantly. The trailer had only two phones - one on each end - for all of us. One was tied into the existing TBC phone network and the other sat in a corner on my desk since I was the newbie engineer and had to give up the precious desk real estate. This phone was a recently added line with a completely different exchange that turned out to be the old number of an bar nearby that fairly recently went out of business. We found that out after weeks of being puzzled as the why we were getting so many wrong numbers around lunch time that would hang up as soon as we said "Tacoma Boat". Finally, someone heard the bar name and had the bright idea to look it up in an old phone book, and sure enough the number was there. Hey, I told you we were good as this was a good 10-15 years before reverse lookup on the web.
Anyway, this started a string of pulling phone pranks. We all started answering the phone pretending to be the bar taking orders for lunch, checking to see if "Fred was there", etc. It seemed like fun at the time and certainly broke up an otherwise hectic day, until one day I sort of broke the mold when someone called for a co-worker of mine who I'll call Jim.
"Ski speaking", I answered. The guy one the other end asked to if there was a Jim at this number.
"Jim, call for you", I yelled across the trailer. Who is it? he wanted to know.
Now I had no idea who the caller was as he didn't identify himself, so I decided to make something up and pull Jim's leg because as mild and unassuming his demeanor was, he was also probably the one guy more than any other who got a kick taking the false lunch orders and imagine what those unsuspecting patrons thought when the pulled up to the defunct bar. Knowing this, I tried to think of the most outrageous thing to startle the other co-workers.
"He didn't give his name (true), but he said something about you messing around with his wife!" That last part was totally untrue. Or so I thought.
Jim looked at me strangely as he crossed the trailer to answer the call while I noticed that my joke didn't get any attention form the other co-workers. Either they were all too busy, or the joke just bombed. Either way, I was disappointed enough to forget about it and go back to my work while Jim stood by my desk talking in a hushed voice.
After a few minutes, as he hung up the phone Jim looked nervously around the trailer and leaning over my desk so no one else would hear he said:
"I would appreciate it if you would keep the nature of this call confidential, Ski".
"Wha?? I don't know what you're talking about, Jim."
"That call. See I meant this woman in a bar a couple weeks ago, and ..."
At first I thought Jim was turning the prank back on me, but no. He did meet a gal who never let on she was married, dated her a couple of times (and lord only knows what else) and the hubby called Jim to tell him it was over. I could see by how Jim wasn't opening up the conversation to the other guys in the trailer and foregoing the comedic effect of pranking me with my own prank that he was serious and I finally believed him.
And try as I might, Jim never believed that I had just made it up on the spot and had know nothing previously. If he thought I was a jerk for yelling out a statement that was a one-in-a-centillion truth, he never said. But he was always grateful for keeping my silence. Me, ever since then I always answer the phone the right way.
Anyway, this started a string of pulling phone pranks. We all started answering the phone pretending to be the bar taking orders for lunch, checking to see if "Fred was there", etc. It seemed like fun at the time and certainly broke up an otherwise hectic day, until one day I sort of broke the mold when someone called for a co-worker of mine who I'll call Jim.
"Ski speaking", I answered. The guy one the other end asked to if there was a Jim at this number.
"Jim, call for you", I yelled across the trailer. Who is it? he wanted to know.
Now I had no idea who the caller was as he didn't identify himself, so I decided to make something up and pull Jim's leg because as mild and unassuming his demeanor was, he was also probably the one guy more than any other who got a kick taking the false lunch orders and imagine what those unsuspecting patrons thought when the pulled up to the defunct bar. Knowing this, I tried to think of the most outrageous thing to startle the other co-workers.
"He didn't give his name (true), but he said something about you messing around with his wife!" That last part was totally untrue. Or so I thought.
Jim looked at me strangely as he crossed the trailer to answer the call while I noticed that my joke didn't get any attention form the other co-workers. Either they were all too busy, or the joke just bombed. Either way, I was disappointed enough to forget about it and go back to my work while Jim stood by my desk talking in a hushed voice.
After a few minutes, as he hung up the phone Jim looked nervously around the trailer and leaning over my desk so no one else would hear he said:
"I would appreciate it if you would keep the nature of this call confidential, Ski".
"Wha?? I don't know what you're talking about, Jim."
"That call. See I meant this woman in a bar a couple weeks ago, and ..."
At first I thought Jim was turning the prank back on me, but no. He did meet a gal who never let on she was married, dated her a couple of times (and lord only knows what else) and the hubby called Jim to tell him it was over. I could see by how Jim wasn't opening up the conversation to the other guys in the trailer and foregoing the comedic effect of pranking me with my own prank that he was serious and I finally believed him.
And try as I might, Jim never believed that I had just made it up on the spot and had know nothing previously. If he thought I was a jerk for yelling out a statement that was a one-in-a-centillion truth, he never said. But he was always grateful for keeping my silence. Me, ever since then I always answer the phone the right way.
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